I hadn’t seen a swimming pool until I was in class 12, when I was 17 years old.

And then, I built my first pool when I was 24.

I come from a lower middle class family in Lucknow that, no matter its conditions, placed huge emphasis on education. I studied at LaMartinere’s in the city. Some of my friends were sons of army officers and I was visiting an army club with them and that was where I saw my first pool. Little did I know of the destiny I was to build in this line.

I never really thought that building pools is something I would end up doing.

I completed my Civil Engineering from Pant Nagar University and came to Delhi in 1997. The job scene was bad. Most mechanical, civil and electrical engineers were going into software, learning languages such as Java. Those who were better at communications took up sales jobs.

I got into sales with a company that was selling computers. One of my friends was with a company that built swimming pools. We were all from the same engineering college and were putting up together. We would discuss work and the many possibilities that were in front of us when we pooled our knowledge.

I Learnt swimming in my own pool at age CCC.

Eventually, in 1998, we started a company together. Things didn’t work out the way we planned it. It had to be wrapped up in 2001. He went his way and I came my way. I restarted it in 2002. That was when Premium Pool was established as we know it today.

The first pools we built were for Praveen Nair (an exporter), and Jawahar Oswal(owner of Oswal Group). Both were built simultaneously.

I built many pools for exporters, business people and big builders. The pool closest to my heart, as of now, is the one I built for ATS village (link to pic and story). This catapulted us from an Rs 25 lakh (Rs 2.5 million) company to an Rs 1 crore (10 million) organization. Today, we are an Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million) organization with tie-ups with a leading US-based pool building company (link to either their website or your tie-up page).

I consider the managing director of ATS, Mr Gitambaram, my mentor. We were an Rs 25 lakh (Rs 2.5 million) organization and, after trying us out with a small project of about 12 lakhs (1.2 million), he gave us a contract to build 40 pools for ATS Village. That meant, we would be building one mega pool and 39 smaller pools in the penthouses and row houses.

This catapulted us into the big league.

The fact that Mr Gitambaram could trust someone like us who didn’t have experience of building at this magnitude, shows his ability to gauge the potential in the quality we provided him.

With this project, we went from building pools for Rs 6-7 lakhs (Rs 600,000-700,000) to a project of Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million). This was four times our turnover. Today, we do business worth 5 crores and are looking to take this turnover to four times its present size.

The ATS Village pool is the one closest to my heart. This was the big leap for Premium Pools.

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Pinky Sharma - About Author:I come from a lower middle class family in Lucknow that, no matter its conditions, placed huge emphasis on education.